RE: [PATCH] xemacs-21.5: make man/xemacs-faq.texi ready to replace http://www.xemacs.org/FAQ content
> No. They just encourage people to refer to out-of-date
material.
Well, they would serve people who want to read the FAQ
offline, in notepad, or on paper perhaps.
Anyway, they don't seem to have a strong lobby here.
> People who need them for some reason can make them easily enough.
I have serious doubts about that one. People feeling the
need for the FAQ in .txt or .dvi form will probably not be
the same people knowing how to produce them.
Making the XEmacs editor easily installable with up-to-date
docs (FAQ being an important one) is probably the best
service we can provide to the world.
I agree.
I am leaning towards the radical approach of making the FAQ
in the http://www.xemacs.org/ sidebar link to the current
beta FAQ, split by chapter only, assuming it will have
updated information about the currently stable and beta XEmacs.
I would then put in a few relative symlinks on the master
websites (created by make init) to that new FAQ for backward
compatibility with released XEmacs versions advertizing
http://www.xemacs.org/FAQ/xemacs-faq.html, and explain this
change in the http://www.xemacs.org/FAQ/index.html page.
How about that?
Please do this. All my updating of the FAQ has been with the explicit
intention that there should be only one FAQ to rule them all and in the
darkness ... Oh never mind :) Anyway, here are the policies I followed for
updating the FAQ; I think we should make this official, and same policies
could apply to other docs, e.g. internals [maybe even XEmacs Ref and lispref
-- now that's a thought!]:
1. Supported versions include the beta version and the two
most recent supported versions of XEmacs. In this case
it's 21,5, 21.4 and 21.1.
2. There should be one FAQ for all supported versions.
3. The FAQ should include entries relevant to all versions,
even when such an entry is relevant to just one. Entries
relevant only to the older of the two stable versions go
into a "legacy" section at the back.
4. When there is a difference in functionality between the
versions that relates to the entry, it should describe
what to do in all supported versions -- or at the very
least, in both the current stable version and the
beta version.
5. Stuff older than any of the supported version should be
simply deleted, unless it's required for some historical
reasons (more likely to be of relevance to the Internals
manual). (Or, perhaps, moved into a separate
"obsolete" file -- NOT in the same file as the FAQ.)